Advanced Internet Marketing
Once you have mastered the basics of marketing on the internet and are seeing results, you need to move onto advanced internet marketing. Even if you aren’t ready to actually implement advanced marketing, knowing about it in advance can help you prepare for jumping into it when the time is right.
Why Worry About Advanced Internet Marketing?
Many people learn the basics of internet marketing and then stop. They figure they are doing well right where they are, so there is no reason to move forward. Why mess with a good thing?
There are plenty of reasons why you need to know as much about internet marketing as you can. You may be doing very well on your website right now, but you need to be constantly growing your marketing and adapting to the changing demands of your potential customers if you are going to stay ahead. This is where advanced internet marketing comes into the picture.
In regular marketing, the store across town is your competition. You may only have to worry about staying ahead of a few other businesses in your area. But online, stores all over the world are your competition. You potentially have to worry about hundreds of other businesses trying to steal away your customers. Since the world seems to be growing more impersonal, and customer loyalty is hard to come by anymore, this can represent a big problem to be overcome.
So What Do You Do?
The first thing you should do before focusing on advanced internet marketing is to give yourself a refresher course on any internet marketing strategies you already use. Use updated materials and sources to see if any new strategies have become available. This is a great start because you can put these to work for you without having to learn entire new methods.
Then turn to books, magazines on internet marketing, and well established websites that are recommended. See what is next in line for you to tackle in your marketing campaign.
There are plenty of options available, so you should be able to sift through them to find one that you are not only comfortable using, but is also relevant to your business. Certain advanced internet marketing methods work better for some businesses than others, so only you can decide which direction you wish to take your marketing efforts.
Don’t Rush, but Move Forward
You don’t have to go racing into new marketing right away if you are doing well at the moment. You can use the opportunity to just learn all you can about the methods you are going to implement next. But you do need to always be learning something and preparing for the next stage of your website and business. This keeps progress and growth from catching you off guard.
If your current internet marketing efforts are based around the same tried and true tactics that seem to be working well, consider adding video marketing or perhaps even social networking to your overall marketing.
It may not be obvious right now, but you are doing yourself a big favor by learning about advanced internet marketing. Even if you just research it in your spare time, you will begin to formulate ideas and plans for the future of your business. This sort of preparedness and forward thinking will keep you going strong in the market for many years to come.
Starting Your Own Blog
If you are interested in starting your own blog one of the most important decisions you’ll make is choosing the best blog software. You have several choices, many of them are free, but before you choose just the right type of software you have to decide what you are going to use your blog for. That really will make a big difference in choosing the right software for your needs.
For example, if you are just blogging about your life and you have no real interest in making money from your blog, than virtually any free software will do, such as WordPress or Blogger. At this stage the most important thing for you to consider is the ease of use. You can use each type of blog for a while just to see which one you feel the most comfortable with.
If, on the other hand, you are using your blog to make money either as an affiliate marketer or with the use of Adsense, you will need to be a little more careful. The actual software can still be the same, for instance many internet marketers prefer the WordPress platforms. The difference is that you won’t want a free WordPress site. Instead you will want to buy your own domain name, so you own it, and have your blog hosted on another site such as HostGator.com, www.1and1.com, BlueHost.com. That way your blog is your own personal piece of online real estate, you own it and you can control what you put on your site and what you do with it.
A great resource for reviewing hosting services is https://www.cnet.com/web-hosting/.
Going with the free version for a business blog is a very risky proposition Any of the free blogging sites have their own terms of service (TOS), which are always changing, if they find your blog to not be compliant with their TOS, the can delete your blog. Now think of what that would mean if you were making money with a particular blog and you’ve spent time building up traffic to that blog and one day it was just gone! Yikes.
Another thing to take into consideration when looking for the best software are the types of plugins available. Plugins are small software programs that you can literally ‘plugin’ to your blog by just a few clicks of the mouse, anyone can use them, and there are probably ten’s of thousands of them available for every imaginable need, and most are free. If this concept seems weird to you, just think of them like apps for a smart phone, it’s a similar concept. Some types of blogs will have a lot more plugins than others, so this could help you make up your mind which is best for you.
It’s always nice to have options, and when it comes to finding the best blog software you have quite a few. Just keep your overall goals in mind when trying to decide which is best for you. For the most part, if you are just a ‘personal blogger’ and not really in it to make money, the free versions are just fine for you and your needs.
Improving Your Online Marketing Efforts
One of the most important things you can do to improve the success of your online marketing efforts is to take the time to build an opt in email list. When customers come to your website you can encourage them to sign up to your email list by offering them an incentive. Once they’ve signed up to your list you can communicate with them as often as you want. You have two options when it comes to communicating with them, an email series and blast emails.
A email series is simply a number of emails, you determine how many, that have already been written and loaded into an autoresponder and that will be sent out over a period of time, automatically. For example, if you have created a series of emails that consists of 10 emails and you schedule them to go out daily, every person who signs up to your email or newsletter will immediately get the first email and they will then receive one email a day for nine more days . The emails will continue to go out in the order you set them up in. That way everyone will receive your emails whether they’ve been signed up for a long time or whether they’ve just signed up.
When you do a blast you will send out the same email to everyone on your list at the same time. Everyone will receive the same message whether they’ve been signed up to your list for years or days. This type of email message is particularly effective if you have some new product or service you want to let your customers know about, or if you’re having a sale. This is a great way to offer your customers a coupon for an upcoming sale.
Remember though, no email will be effective if it isn’t read. For that reason make sure to follow these tips to get the most out of all of your email campaigns:
1. Carefully consider who your target audience is and what they want.
If you’re not sure you can ask them. Send out an email and ask them to let you know what questions they have or what products they may be interested in.
2. Make sure you use a title that will pique their curiosity.
No matter how well written an email is, it won’t do you any good if your customers don’t read it. Make the headline something compelling.
3. Make your message short and to the point.
While you will want to ‘sell’ your customers a little bit if your message drags on and on you will most likely lose them. Just highlight the most important things: what’s in it for them. They will make up their own mind from that point on.
By keeping these tips in mind you can dramatically improve your results from all of your email marketing efforts whether you use a series of emails or blast emails or both. Just give your customers what they want and they’ll reward you for it by purchasing your products or services. Everyone wins!
Continued in Part 3…